I read Lottie Mills’ debut collection Monstrum in a couple of sittings. The stories are that good! They explore what is monstrous, and what we may perceive as otherness. They challenge the reader and society to re-examine all of our deep rooted assumptions. Every single beautifully crafted story is an eerie, gripping and alluring message to our world. And each is unequivocally strong in its own right, unique but connected through the theme of disability and the monstrous, because Mills shows us that being different doesn’t mean we are worse than what might be perceived as the norm. It might be that Monstrum isn’t for every reader, but it is worth every reader having a go.
"The Mirror" shows a young girl doing the shopping for her supposedly monstrous mistress. Through her small acts of kindness, she makes the relationship work and rejects this conception of monstrosity. There is an implied sexual relationship in the story, and a poignant ending.
"The Changeling," the opening story, sticks with the reader long after they finish and we can see why it was a prize winner. It’s a sublime, ethereal tale about deformity and physical change, and asks what are our expectations of what we see as normal. The writing is evocative and clear.
In "The Cuckoo," as the title implies, we are confronted by a strange child who infiltrates a household, and removes the protagonist from her own life with weird ease. This is psychological horror story demonstrating the terror of being replaced, unseen, unprotected.
"The Body" features a particularly belligerent attitude towards disability. It is set in a world where you can ask for, or purchase a new body. The main character in this story finds it difficult to let go of her old body and struggles to cope with the physical changes that come with a new non-disabled body. When she uses her old wheelchair, it is a particularly discordant moment. She finds that her new, whole body no longer has the muscle memory her original one had, and she is forced to relearn much of what used to be habitual, her own "normal." Mills never takes the easy way out. She examines how this is not an easy solution and the myriad struggles that it brings with it. The main character is confronted when others find out about her original disabled body, and the complex relationship she now has with the new body.
Mills has shown the reader a world where inhumanity often comes from the ordinary, and where we can see kindness and warmth in those that we have been taught to fear. The result is a beautifully strong collection of stories that are heartbreaking at times as well as being intellectually rigorous, and written in prose that is so pure that it is almost perfection. Monstrum is a critical, politically sensitive piece of disability literature disguised as gothic nightmare, grotesque theatre. Mills invites us into her darkness, and we cannot escape, demanding we see the beauty, potential, power and provocation flourishing there. It is a dazzling, remarkable debut.
Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.
